Underdogs - By Markus Zusak Page 0,1

and the optometrist. It never happened.

“And this time I’m serious.” Rube sat forward on the couch. He must have been seeing what I was thinking.

We weren’t robbing anything.

We were hopeless.

Hopeless, pitiful, and a shake-your-head kind of pathetic.

I myself had a job twice a week delivering newspapers but I got sacked after I broke some guy’s kitchen window. It wasn’t even a hard throw. It just happened. The window was there half open, I threw the paper, and Smack! It went through the glass. The bloke came running out and went berserk and hurled abuse at me as I stood there with a pile of ridiculous tears in my eyes. The job was gone — cursed from the start.

My name’s Cameron Wolfe.

I live in the city.

I go to school.

I’m not popular with the girls. I have a little bit of sense. I don’t have much sense.

I have thick, furry hair that isn’t long but always looks messy and always sticks up, no matter how hard I try keeping it down.

My older brother Ruben gets me into plenty of trouble.

I get Rube into as much trouble as he gets me into.

I have another brother named Steve who’s the oldest and is the winner of the family. He’s had quite a few girls and has a good job and he’s the one a lot of people like. He’s also some kind of good footballer on top of

I have a sister named Sarah who sits on the couch with her boyfriend and has him stick his tongue down her throat whenever possible. Sarah’s second oldest.

I have a father who constantly tells Rube and me to wash ourselves because he reckons we look filthy and stink like jungle animals crawling out of the mud.

(“I don’t bloody stink!” I argue with him. “And I have a shower quite bloody regularly!”

“Well have you heard of soap? … I was once your age myself y’ know, and I know how filthy guys your age are.”

“Is that right?”

“Of course it is. I wouldn’t say it otherwise.” No point arguing on.)

I have a mother who says very little but is the toughest thing in our house.

I have a family, yes, that doesn’t really function without tomato sauce.

I like winter.

That’s me.

Oh, and yeah, at the point in time I’m talking about, I had never, not even once, robbed a single thing in my life. I just talked about it with Rube, exactly like that day in the lounge room.

“Oi.”

Rube slapped Sarah on the arm as she kissed that boyfriend on our couch.

“Oi — we’re gonna rob the dentist.” Sarah stopped. “Hey?” she enquired.

“Ah, forget it.” Rube looked away. “Is this a useless house or isn’t it? There are ignorant people everywhere, too busy with ‘emselves to care.”

“Ah, stop whingein’,” I told him.

He looked at me. That was all he did, as Sarah got back down to business.

I switched off the TV then and we left. We left to check out the dentist’s surgery we were going to “hit,” as Rube put it. (The real reason we went there was just to get out of the house, because Sarah and her boyfriend were going insane in the lounge room and our mother was cooking mushrooms in the kitchen, which stank out the whole place.)

“Bloody mushrooms again,” I said as we walked out onto the street.

“Yeah,” Rube smirked. “Just drown ‘em in tomato sauce again so you can’t taste ‘em.”

“Bloody oath.”

What whingers.

“And there she is.” Rube smiled as we walked onto Main Street in the darkening air of June and winter. “Doctor Thomas G. Edmunds. Bachelor of Dental Surgery. Beautiful.”

We started making a plan.

Plan-making between my brother and me consisted of me asking questions and Rube answering them. It went like this:

“Won’t we need a gun or somethin’? Or a knife? That fake gun we had got lost.”

“It isn’t lost. It’s behind the couch.” “Y’ sure?”

“Yes. I’m sure … and in any case, we don’t need it. All we need is the cricket bat and we’ll get next-door’s baseball bat, right?” He laughed, very sarcastically. “We swing those babies a few times and they can’t possibly say no.”

“Okay.”

Okay.

Yeah, right.

We scheduled everything for the next afternoon. We got the bats, we went over everything we had to remember, and we knew we weren’t going to do it. Even Rube knew.

We went to the dentist next day anyway, and for the first time ever in one of our heists, we actually went inside.

What greeted us was a shock, because behind the counter was the most